Research and develop the commercial potential of a retail organisation's trading location
Overview
This standard is relevant to your role if you are a manager, area manager or regional manager with some responsibility at a local level for:
- raising or maintaining local awareness of your retail organisation
- putting across a positive image of your retail organisation to people in the local area
- liaising with other organisations such as local authorities to help
improve local trading conditions
developing the commercial potential of your retail organisation through marketing and public relations activities
You may or may not be guided in your commercial activities by your head office, but you must also research local knowledge that can be used to your retail organisation's commercial advantage.
For simplicity we have referred throughout the standard to a single organisation but if you are a regional or area manager you should understand this to mean all the retail organisations you manage.
Similarly, any references to location or local conditions apply to each individual site in your area or region.
This standard is for staff with responsibility for researching and developing the commercial potential of a retail organisation's trading location.
When you have completed this standard you will be able to demonstrate your understanding of and ability to:
- Research and develop the commercial potential of a retail organisation's trading location
Performance criteria
You must be able to:
- follow your workplace procedures to research and identify opportunities to publicise and promote your workplace locally
- identify and pursue local marketing or public relations opportunities considering all relevant factors including:
- available budget
- your workplace procedures
- your workplaces image and ethos
- relevant legislation for health and safety
- risk to your workplace reputation
- potential to increase sales
- follow your workplace procedures to assess the impact of marketing or public relations activities and work out the reasons why they had the impact they did
- learn from successes and failures and share the findings with colleagues following your workplace procedures
- within the limits of your authority and following your workplace procedures, develop and plan:
- location layouts
- product ranges
- approaches to merchandising
- special offers or promotions
- consider trading conditions including local trading conditions
- follow your workplace procedures to liaise with other organisations to help improve local trading conditions
- identify opportunities to influence decision makers who control external factors that affect trading
- follow your workplace procedures to communicate with external decision makers when developing the commercial potential of your workplace
Knowledge and Understanding
You need to know and understand:
- how to research and identify opportunities for marketing and public relations activities to develop the commercial potential of your trading location(s)
- your sales targets and how sales are measured and forecast
- your workplace procedures and approach to marketing and public relations and the image your workplace needs to create or maintain
- who your local competitors are
- local trading conditions, and how they affect:
- location layout
- product range
- merchandising
- special offers or promotions
- the potential for involving your workplace staff in generating ideas for marketing and public relations activities
- why it is important to involve your workplace staff where possible
- the level of your authority to make decisions that affect customers' awareness and perception of your workplace
- the financial and other resources available for boosting the image and sales of your workplace
- relevant marketing and public relations ideas that have already been tried, how successful they were and why they succeeded or failed
- who the decision makers are that control external factors affecting the trading location and what channels of communication are most effective for liaising with and influencing them